Whipping Star —
Frank Herbert
ConSentiency, book 1

1970’s
Whipping
Star
is the third piece and first novel-length work in
Frank Herbert’s ConSentiency
series. I hope I’ve worked out how I am going to number Whipping
Star
by the time I post this review.

The
ConSentiency spans the Milky Way. While faster than light drives
exist, all are too slow for galactic travel. What made the
ConSentiency practical was the jumpdoor. Jumpdoors allow people to
step from the surface of one planet to the surface of another.
Jumpdoors were so clearly useful that nobody questioned their
enigmatic Caleban creators too closely about how exactly they worked.

Jumpdoors
have some interesting undocumented features. For example, someone who
knows their jumpdoors can use them to kill an astonishing fraction of
the population of the ConSentiency in one go.

Restoree —
Anne McCaffrey

Anne
McCaffrey’s standalone SF novel Restoree
was
her debut novel.

Snatched
by monstrous aliens, embittered spinster Sara wakes from nightmares
to find herself transformed from an all-too-Semitic-looking woman
whom nobody could possibly love to a beauty. Her current
captors are using her as grunt labor in a mental institution. They
regard her as semi-intelligent and unthreatening.

Her
masters’ underestimation of Sara’s cognitive abilities will prove
their undoing.

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld —
Patricia A. McKillip

1974’s
standalone secondary world fantasy The
Forgotten Beasts of Eld
was Patricia A. McKillip’s second fantasy novel. It won the World
Fantasy Award and was nominated for the Mythopoeic
Fantasy Award1.

Raised
in isolation by her mage father, the ice-white lady Sybel is content
to live with her menagerie of fantastic beasts. She knows nothing of
the company of humans and cares naught for the lack.

This
does not prevent a stranger from arriving on her doorstep, bearing a
child whom he means to foist on her.

Hothouse —
Brian Aldiss

In
a distant future, the Earth is
tide-locked to the Sun,
while the Moon has retreated to one of the Earth-Sun
Lagrange points.
On the illuminated side of Earth, a vast banyan tree dominates the
land. In this overheated world, voracious plants dominate. Only four
groups of insects still exist on the banyan-dominated land: wasps, bees, ants and
termites. All other animals are extinct.

Cadaverific —
Becka Kinzie

To
quote Becka Kinzie’s site:

Hello,
I’m a freelance artist from the K-W Region. I’ve also been
working as a colour flatter and colouring assistant since the early
2010s. In my spare time, I create my own macabre series of comics,
which are posted online. The pages are eventually made into comic
book issues, and so far I have self-published 15 of them (for sale at
events/conventions).

Kenzie’s
first webcomic, Cadaverific,
ran from 2008 to 2014.

Corey
Bowman’s story should have ended the night the night he died. A
minor altercation between Corey and a low-rent acquaintance ended in
Corey’s accidental death. Yes, the story should have ended there,
but it didn’t. Corey’s cousin J. P. just happened to have come
into possession of a monkey’s paw — sorry, the
Monkey’s
Paw — and in an idle moment of grief, wished Corey was back among his friends.

The Keeper of the Isis Light —
Monica Hughes
Isis, book 1

1980’s
The Keeper of the Isis Light
is the first volume in Monica Hughes’ Isis Trilogy.

Olwen
Pendennis has been the keeper of the Isis FTL beacon ever since she
was an infant, an infant orphaned by calamity on distant Isis. For
her, life with no human companions is perfectly normal. After all,
she has her wise robot Guardian to advise and keep watch over her,
her amiable but formidable-looking Hairy Dragon Hobbit for company,
and an entire planet to call her own.

On
her tenth birthday — sixteenth by Earth years — her life changes
forever.

Projections —
Stephen Robinett

Stephen
Robinett’s1
science fiction career2
ran from 1969 to 1983. In that time he produced five novels and
twenty-one short stories. He appears to have disappeared from the
science fiction world after 1983. Robinett died from complications of
Hodgkin’s Disease in 2004, but it took a further five
years for that news to filter back to SFdom.

A
1979 collection, Projections,
contains
nine Robinett stories, stories of which he was particular fond.

Adam Link, Robot —
Eando Binder

Eando
Binder’s
i
1965
Adam
Link, Robot
is a fix-up of stories first published in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Adam
Link is the product of years of work by kindly Dr. Charles Link. 500
pounds of unstoppable metal guided by an iridium-sponge brain, the
robot is the first of its kind. Thanks to Dr. Link’s careful
training, it is not in any way a ravening, unstoppable killbot.

Unfortunately
for Adam, Dr. Link is one of the very few people willing to give the
robot the benefit of the doubt. When Dr. Link is killed in a
household mishap, Adam is immediately accused of killing the old man.
With public opinion against him, Adam has little chance of winning a
trial. Indeed, the odds of him surviving long enough to get a trial
are poor. He is, after all, only a machine.

The Starmen of Llyrdis —
Leigh Brackett

Leigh
Brackett’s standalone space adventure The
Starmen of Llyrdis
was first published in 1952, under the title The Starmen.

Perpetually
out of step with the world, Michael Trehearne has travelled to
Brittany in search of his family roots. When he glimpses a face much
like his own, he is convinced he has come to the right place. He is
both right and wrong: some of his kin are at hand but they are only
visiting
Brittany. Their true home is far from France.

Death Comes as the End —
Agatha Christie

1944’s
Death Comes as the End
was Agatha Christie’s sole foray into historical mystery. In it,
she abandoned her familiar 20
th
century England for Egypt at the very end of the First
Intermediate Period.
I
seem to have a weakness? superpower? for discovering authors through
their most atypical work, so it should come as no surprise that this
was the very first Agatha Christie I ever read.

Recently
widowed, young Renisenb returns to her family home in Thebes.
Although she has been gone for eight years, little of significance
seems to have changed. Her mortuary-priest father Imhotep still
micromanages the household (through letters if he is away on
business); her older brothers Yamose and Sobek still squabble with
each other, and the youngest brother Ipy is still spoiled. The older
brothers are married, but their wives have little influence over the household.

Imhotep’s
scribe Hori could tell her this stability is an illusion. All it
takes to destroy it is an old man’s foolish infatuation with a
beautiful young girl.

The World at Bay —
Paul Capon
Winston Science Fiction, book 26

Paul
Capon’s 1954 standalone The
World at Bay was
the 26th
juvenile science fiction novel published by the
John C. Winston company.

Professor
Elrick has long suspected that Poppea, the third world of the dark
star Nero, is inhabited. The Professor also believes an invasion from
that doomed world is imminent. Alas, aside from his loyal teenaged
assistant Jim Shannon, few believe Elrick. Instead, skeptics insist
that the objects flying in formation from the Nero system toward
Earth are only meteors of some sort.

Once
the objects arrive at Earth, a wave of radio silence begins to spread
along the terminator. Elrick was right, but the price of his
vindication may be humanity’s doom.

In the Ocean of Night —
Gregory Benford
Galactic Centre, book 1

The
1978 fix-up
In
the Ocean of Night
is the first volume in Gregory Benford’s Galactic
Centre
series1.

In
the far-off year of 1999, British-American astronaut Nigel Walmsley
is part of a two-man team sent by NASA to the asteroid Icarus.
Unexplained out-gassing has transformed a body remarkable only for
its eccentric orbit into an impending Earth-impacter. Nigel and Len’s
mission is to determine how much, if any, of Icarus remains. If
enough material is left to present a significant risk to the Earth,
they are to destroy or divert Icarus with the Egg, a fifty-megaton
fusion bomb.

The
hope was that nothing would remain after the Egg had been used. The
expectation was that a chunk of rock and iron might head for Bengal.
The reality was a surprise: the large mass that had survived the
out-gassing was an alien spaceship.

Justice, Inc. —
Paul Ernst
Avenger, book 1

Justice,
Inc. is
the first volume of Paul Ernst’s The
Avenger pulp
series, which was published in 1939 by Smith and Street under the
Kenneth
Robeson house name.

Desperate
to reach Montreal before his mother-in-law dies, millionaire Richard
Benson forces a plane leaving Buffalo to allow Benson, Alicia and
their daughter Alice to occupy three empty seats. Once the plane is
in the air, fastidiousness sends Benson to the lavatory to wash his
almost clean hands. When he emerges, Alicia and Alice are nowhere to
be seen. The flight crew and passengers all agree that Benson boarded
the plane alone.

The
altercation that follows ends when someone knocks Benson cold with a
fire extinguisher. He languishes unconscious for three weeks. When he
awakes, he is a man transformed.

Rogue Queen —
L. Sprague de Camp

Our
protagonist, Iroedh, is a member of the worker-caste in the Avtiny
community. Her group faces an existential threat: invasion and
enslavement by its more aggressive and larger Arsuuni neighbours.
Iroedh, as a scholar and antiquarian, seems to be of no use in the
struggle. She is looked down on by her fellow Avtiny.

The Black Cloud —
Fred Hoyle

1957’s
The
Black Cloud
was Sir Fred Hoyle’s first novel.

A
young astronomer working
a blink comparator gets a career-making break when he notices
that a small black region on two photographic plates grew measurably
in the month between exposures. After a hurried consultation, the
discoverer and his colleagues conclude:

The
dark spot is an interstellar cloud.

Its
apparent growth is because it is headed towards the Solar System.

The
lack of transverse motion means that it is headed directly at the
Solar System.

It
will arrive in about two years.

Exciting
times to be an astronomer! Very exciting, because if the cloud passes
between the Earth and the Sun it is dense enough to blot out sunlight
entirely
1, dooming us all to a slow lingering death.

Well,
the discoverer can enjoy his enhanced career for the two years he has left.

A Different Light —
Elizabeth A. Lynn

1978’s
standalone novel A
Different Light
was written by Elizabeth A. Lynn. She is an
author I enjoy..

Jimson
Alleca has the bad luck (a one in a billion chance) to be an adult
cancer patient in a galaxy where cancer is unknown. Modern medicine
may have failed him, but it can at least offer him good odds of
surviving until his fifties. Provided he is lucky. Provided his
doctors can keep finding new treatments faster than the cancer can
kill him. Provided he never, ever tries to leave his homeworld; the
stress of travel through hyperspace would reduce his remaining years
from twenty to one.

Living
to be safe may be extending his life but it’s killing his soul.
Others may still applaud his art, but he can tell his development has
stalled. When Russell, a former lover who left Jimson years ago,
sends an enigmatic message, Jimson cannot resist the lure of mystery
and escape. Better one year of glory than decades of stagnation.

Bakka Books —

Reviewing
reviews is a bit meta, but … if I were going to review another
reviewer in this series, the reviewer would be Spider Robinson, whose
columns I devoured as a teenager. His review in the December 1976 issue of the late, lamented Galaxy Magazine (RIP)
had an enormous
effect on me, because
in
it
he revealed a previously unknown fact: Toronto, then Canada’s
second largest city, had a bookstore specializing in science fiction
and fantasy. A bookstore called Bakka Books.

There
was just one problem. I didn’t live in Toronto. In fact, I didn’t
even live in Kitchener-Waterloo. I lived
adjacent to KW, on a farm well away from any intercity bus routes. Then as
now, I did not drive. While I am an avid walker, 100 km to Toronto
and 100 km back seemed a bit far. What to do?

Seven Days in May —
Fletcher Knebel & Charles W. Bailey II

Fletcher
Knebel and Charles W. Bailey’s 1962’s Seven
Days in May is
a best-selling political thriller set in the early 1970s.

The
struggle over Iran brought the Americans and Soviets to the brink of
all-out war. Republican President Edgar Frazier’s decision to
accept a divided Iran was reasonable under the circumstances (it
averted nuclear war) but it was political suicide for him1.

As
his Democratic Party replacement Jordan Lyman discovers, sometimes
success is just the opportunity to fail on a more epic scale.

H.
H. Holmes’ 1942 mystery
Rocket
to the Morgue
is a sequel to 1940’s Nine
Times Nine
.
In
Nine
Times Nine
,
Detective Inspector Terry Marshall, assisted by Sister Ursula of the
Sisters of Martha of Bethany, solved a locked-room mystery. In
Rocket,
the intrepid duo will confront something far more vexing:

RuneQuest, Second Edition —
Steve Perrin & Ray Turney

My
first year at university, I encountered my first roleplaying games;
two of those games I still remember fondly. Well, perhaps three, but
I’ll explain that in a footnote [1]. The first game was Traveller,
which I reviewed here. The second was Chaosium’s RuneQuest,
2nd Edition.
Which is now in print again, thank Ghu.

Like
Traveller,
RuneQuest
is
a skill-based system. Like Traveller,
the skills that count are somewhat mundane. However, unlike
Traveller, whose
basic rule set was quite unspecific about the setting, RuneQuest was
explicitly set in Greg
Stafford’s Glorantha.

I
should perhaps add that both games, unlike a lot of role-playing
games then and now, are designed to put wandering murder hobos at a
considerable disadvantage. Just in case you wondered.

Cloned Lives —
Pamela Sargent

1976’s
Cloned
Lives was
Pamela Sargent’s debut novel.

Paul
Swenson and his friends see a brief window of opportunity for
biomedical experimentation: technology has advanced, antique rules
preventing certain lines of research have expired. Assuming that it
is better to ask forgiveness than ask permission, they only reveal
their project to the world once they have the first successful
results to show. Who are:

A Spell for Chameleon —
Piers Anthony
Xanth, book 1

1977’s British Fantasy Award-winning
A
Spell for Chameleon is the first volume in Piers Anthony’s seemingly endless Xanth
series.

Spoiler warning.

Poor
Bink! Each human Xanth has their own unique magical gift. Bink
appears to be one of the few exceptions, with no discernible magical
talent. Not only does this place him at a considerable disadvantage
to his fellow humans but it will cost him his place in Xanth. Human
law mandates exile for those without magic.

On
the slim chance the Good Magician Humfrey’s powers can uncover the
talent all previous attempts to discover have failed to spot, Bink
set out to offer a year of service to the Magician in exchange for
Humfrey’s help.